Alan Dershowitz Won’t Forget What Larry David Did to Him

H ere it is , August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist.

Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry.

Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course? The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill.

Its particulars are known.

Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here.

But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.

In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team.

Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation.

It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O.

J.

Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein.

It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.